Vehicles may be equipped with cameras or other sensing devices to detect surroundings of the vehicles. For example, a vehicle may include a plurality of cameras or other sensors around a perimeter of the vehicle (e.g., on different sides of the vehicle, on a front of the vehicle, on a rear of the vehicle, etc.) to capture a view of a road on which the vehicle is traveling, neighboring vehicles, and/or other objects near the vehicle.
One example of sensing technology used to determine an environment of a vehicle is Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), in which a laser light source carried on a vehicle continuously scans surroundings of the vehicle (e.g., 360 degrees of the surroundings). Reflected light from objects in the vehicle surroundings is acquired, indicating a distance from the object. Accordingly, data received from a LiDAR sensor system may include a three-dimensional image of a vehicle surrounding with depth information. A LiDAR dataset may be large (e.g., a 16 beam laser may be used, resulting in the gathering of information regarding reflections from each of the 16 beams), and thereby challenging to process. Since a vehicle may move through an environment quickly, the timeliness of processing data from a LiDAR sensor system may present additional challenges. Some vehicles may offload the processing of LiDAR and other sensor data to cloud-based computing systems via a large-scale wireless network in order to leverage additional computing resources present in such computing systems. However, such an approach may introduce additional transmitting delays, as the cloud-based computing system may be located multiple network hops away from the vehicle and transmission to the cloud-based computing system may be affected by network slowdowns.